More Real than Real
An Artist's
Statement
Some have called art a way of life, some expression, some
seeing. Endless words have
been penned in order to communicate lofty and ineffable concepts.
In a world now dominated by chaos and entropy, when all history has
been
expunged by a philosophic tyrant of modern ugliness, art for me is
eminently simpler. Art relates us to beauty.
From youth I've been seductively and irreparably
drawn to beauty. Eyes askance, swept wide in tremulous abandon and
consumption, I'd
be suddenly drawn to prose, song, color, pen in hand I'd sketch with
the
impassioned fervor of a Michelangelo. Colors would flow from my
palette,
even as Camera in hand. It was natural to explore those feelings in a
passionate and serious way in photography.
Golden Sunlight, Violet Sky, Icy Blue Lakes, Fingered Green Pines, Lemon Yellow Aspens Ablaze With Life. Magenta Lace, Grape Lupines, Pearled Snow, Azure Expanse. Colors in their own right, Colors playing the senses. Colors as Emotion flowing in concert the soul stirring still greater truth.
Form as the tree and flower, the concrete wonder of amazement in the sparkle on an alpine calm, the polished granite that sings to heaven. The tactile touch of tender caress.
The emotion in a familiar's face, a lover's eyes, a baby's cry. These are our real.
Photography is its own beautiful evidence of all these things.
I am not content with poster imagery. I'm not interested at looking at things, but entering them. I wish to sing the song and discover the secrets, color my world in vivid hue, yes enter the hue and relish the thought. Pretty imagery is not enough. I'm not interested in recycled images that feel nothing, say nothing and reveal nothing, but rather, the beauty of art that can sing the interminable song, the song one hears of a brook flowing down a pristine mountainside, or one sees in the harmony of the Pleiades. The song of beauty.
Beauty invites engagement, and this is the secret of all great art, for art is but a song of beauty.
In photography, we see the murmur of a stream, the smell of salty sea breeze, feel the flight of an eagle (As I'm writing this a golden eagle with an enormous wingspan is flying above my window with a majestic berth.) One in visual art can dance purple and sing glory. One can enter beauty with ecstasy. One can sing heaven. One can embrace and relish the soul. Not of just the living, but dead. Such art is a gift, more real than real. As I one argued:
>One receives receives a Gift. You've never entered the voice of the forest? You'veThese are qualities of vision not time. They can't be bought or sold, held or touched, quantified or measured, but are rather felt. Art photography is of such vision. It is to see the beauty of color in even a monochrome world, to hear movement when all is still, to touch with the mind, and caress with the heart. It is to see with the eyes of imagination, even that which cannot be seen.
never climbed a mountain carved of granite and ice and entered its
glory? You've never sung the song of the Pleiades? You've never felt the
texture of a rose? You've never danced between lavender and deep violet?
-Art List April 2001
Art is the song, and we the dance. And, ...Beauty the engagement.
© 2006 Timothy Martin Gillan
Photography
